Formulating a vision is one thing, executing it quite another. The first thing Dermot Dunphy had to decide when he became CEO of Sealed Air was how to build a sales team that could best take advantage of the Bubble Wrap opportunity. He knew dozens of top-notch packaging salesmen, the kind who had Rolodexes bulging with the names of good customers. If he could lure them away from their perches at established companies to join an unknown, unprofitable company they would give Sealed Air an instant foot in the door of the purchasing departments at hundreds of potential customers. Yet he knew they also would bring with them ingrained ways of doing business: discounts, price cuts, deals.No thanks. Dunphy's vision of what he wanted Sealed Air to become sent him down a different path. "We didn't hire anybody from other packaging companies," he explains. "We started off with the assumption that we wanted our people to be superior. Somebody from the packaging industry would just bring with him the same old mindset. Instead, we only hired people just out of school or people who worked at technical companies like Hewlett Packard or superior sales companies like Procter & Gamble. Then we taught them packaging."[i]Finding and training a cadre of sales people to sell benefits, not products, was a costly and time consuming solution, but Dunphy believed it was the only way for Sealed Air to succeed. The sales team would bring a fresh approach, selling promises of protection in an industry in which price had prevailed. But was that all it would take?: : : : :Next up, the lesson.

Part II of the Bill George story, brought to you by the authors of How the Wise Decide.
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Bill George, Part II
After having a faulty Medtronic catheter thrown at him by an angry surgeon, Bill George began investigating why he hadn't known about quality problems plaguing the catheter business. What he found was a tortuous path that routed the sales reps' field reports about failing catheters through seven layers of bureaucracy before they reached the people who designed the products.

Joining us this week on the blog are Bryn Zeckhauser and Aaron Sandoski, authors of How the Wise Decide. They conducted 21 interviews of wise business and government leaders - including, Bill George of Medtronic, Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court, Daniel Kahneman a Nobel Prize Winner in Economics, Shelly Lazarus of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide and many more. They found six decision-making principles.

Part III of the Bill George story, brought to you by the authors of How the Wise Decide.
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Bill George, Part III
Bill George calls his traumatic experience in the Lenox Hill operating room a "power-of-one" observation. That single catheter failure crystallized in a way that no report ever could the problem confronting Medtronic.

This blog post comes from the authors of How the Wise Decide. To read part I, click here and part II. Here's part III:
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Dermot Dunphy, Part III
The real challenge confronting Dermot Dunphy as he pursued his vision for Sealed Ait was how to keep the technological edge that allowed Sealed Air to charge premium prices.